20 Jun 2012

By Lars Lofgren at KISSmetrics:
Social media brings us free traffic, scales well, and requires zero up-front investment. There’s just one problem: tracking social media would make a coal miner weep.

I’ve
got good news. Tracking social media just got a LOT easier. Recently,
Google Analytics received a whole new batch of social reports that break
down your social traffic so you know whether or not your social media
marketing is working.

I’m going to walk you through each new
report so you know how to use these puppies. By the end of this post,
you’ll be completely comfortable using the new Google Analytics social
reports.

Enough chit-chat! Let’s get right to it.

Where to Find the Social Reports

You’ll find the social reports in the Traffic Sources section of Google Analytics. Here’s the step-by-step:

Log into Google Analytics and go to the standard reports of your site

In the left sidebar, click “Traffic Sources”

Then select “Social”

Pick the social report you’d like to view

Let’s dive into each report and find out how to actually use these things.

Overview

This is your “figure-out-if-anything-is-working-at-a-glance-report”.
You
know what’s awesome? Google Analytics decided to include revenue and
conversion data in an overview report! Looks like we’ve been spared a
useless glut of vanity metrics and can actually do some analysis on
what’s working.

Right at the top of the report, we get this tasty batch of data:

From the get-go, you’ll see whether or not social media is sending customers to you.Conversions:
This is the total number of conversions your ENTIRE site has received.
This includes every goal from every traffic source (not just social).

You’ll also see the total value produced by your goals.

Assisted Social Conversions:
These are the conversions that social media helped with. In other
words, these visitors came to your site from social media at least once,
but may have used another traffic source before converting.

Let’s
say I click on one of your tweets and go to your site. But then I leave
before completing any goals. I’m just a social visitor at this point.
But then I come back 2 days later and complete a goal. Then I get
counted as an assisted social conversion.

Last Interaction Social Conversions:
These are all the conversions that were produced directly from a social
traffic source. These visitors came to you from social media and
completed one of your goals within the same visit.

If you haven’t assigned goal values, you’ll get a reports value of $0 for each set of conversions (like the screenshot above).

What’s Missing?

But
alas, the social overview does have one major drawback. The fancy
diagram thingy won’t display unless you have at least one goal active.
So if you’re using ecommerce tracking, no dice. The report stays blank
and asks you to set up goals before it can display any data. It’ll even
show conversion and revenue data in the diagram but it’s greyed out.
Silly? Yes.
See for yourself:

So what’s an ecommerce junkie to do?
Define
one obscure goal that people will never trigger. Then, your conversion
data will come through just fine and the annoying popup will go away.
Double silly? Absolutely.
At the bottom of the report, you’ll see previews of three other reports:

Social Sources

Pages

Social Plugins

Since
these previews have much less data than the main reports, I suggest
skipping these altogether and going straight to each report.

Social Sources

The
Social Sources Report gives you a complete breakdown of what social
media networks are sending you traffic. To get an idea how much traffic
that social networks send you, this is where you want to be.

But remember: this is one giant pile of vanity metrics.
What you’re really looking for is data on conversions. Just hold on to
your britches, we’ll cover the conversion report in a hot second.

How does traffic get tagged as social media?

Google
Analytics looks at the referring URL of the visit. If the URL matches
one of the domains they’ve assigned to a social media network, it pops
up in your social reports under the corresponding social network.

And
Google Analytics uses a list of about a 100 domains to assign traffic
to social networks. But they haven’t published this list yet. So there’s
no way to know if your social media campaigns are getting tagged
correctly until you see the traffic in your own reports.
The good
news from this setup is that you don’t have to do anything for Google
Analytics to start collecting data for your social reports.

The bad news is that it’s easy for this data to be incomplete.

For example, let’s say that you use a popular URL shortener like bit.ly or Buffer and that you use it on many of your social media profiles. Google Analytics will no longer be able to tell that the traffic comes from Facebook.com or Twitter.com.
Instead of the traffic being assigned to the correct social media
network, it comes up as direct traffic or as a referrer from the URL
shortener. Which means the data won’t end up in your social reports.

How to Use the Social Source Graphs

Most Google Analytics reports have a single graph right at the top. But the social source report has two:

The
top graph (the blue one) shows your visits from social media. While the
bottom graph (the orange one) shows your total visits. With this data,
you can quickly see if you received a spike in traffic from something
going viral on social networks. If people are sharing and linking to
something you’ve done, you’ll see a spike in both reports. Otherwise,
something else is going on.

Activity Stream

At the top of the report, you’ll find an Activity Stream button:

Which takes you to a report that shows you recent actions and conversations on social networks that are related to your site.

For activity to get picked up by Google, the social network must be a part of the Social Data Hub. But the list of social networks is a little lackluster. These are the highlights:

Blogger

Google+

Delicious

Digg

Disqus

Meetup

Reddit

If
networks aren’t part of the Social Data Hub (and most aren’t), activity
won’t get picked up at all. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest,
Tumblr, and StumbleUpon are all missing. Since Google has chosen to
compete in the social media space, I would not expect major social
platforms to join anytime soon.

You won’t see activity from the major social networks in your activity stream.
When using this data, remember that it displays a VERY small portion of the total social activity with your site.

Pages

Want
to know what content on your site is most popular with the social media
crowd? You’ve come to the right place my friend! The Social Pages
reports gives you a list of the pages on your site that get the most
attention with social media traffic.

By default, it’s ranked by visits. It also includes these metrics:

Pageviews

Average Visit Duration

Data Hub Activities

Pages/Visit

We’ve
already seen most of these in other reports. But what is Data Hub
Activities? It’s the number of social conversions and events that have
happened on one of the official social networks (the Social Data Hub). Ideally, it would give you the number of times that people interacted with the page on social networks.

But
this only includes data from a few social networks and none of the main
ones. So this metrics is a TINY fraction of the overall activity. Any
conversations or events on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn won’t get
included at all. Considering how restrictive this metric is, I wouldn’t
spend much time with it.

Activity Stream Part Two

In the
Pages report, you’ll also find the activity stream tab. But it doesn’t
do anything different that the activity stream from the Sources report.
It’s the exact same data. So if you check one activity stream, you’ve
checked them both.

Conversions

How about we make our
social media marketing accountable? Engagement is great and all but it
doesn’t keep the lights on. For making sure those dollars and cents are rolling your way,
this is the report for you. While the Overview report gives you some
basic conversion data for all your social traffic, the Conversion report
breaks it down into each social network.

Even
if you don’t have any revenue data (this comes from goal values and
ecommerce tracking), these reports are still exceptionally valuable.
At
a glance, we know which social network is rocking this party (hint:
Facebook). From here, you can now add accountability to ALL your
marketing efforts. Yup, you can make your social media accountable. It’s
shocking, I know.

But that’s not all! We also get an Assisted vs.
Last Interaction Analysis report. Before we dive into what that report
title actually means, let’s back up for a second.
When we look at
conversions, credit gets assigned to the most recent traffic source. So
if I come to your site via Twitter, leave, then google your company name
two days later, the organic search gets the credit. And Twitter gets
nothing.

Here’s the thing, social media is generally terrible at
getting people to buy something or convert right away. It’s amazing at
awareness but it doesn’t close the deal. Social media brings new people
to you while search, email, and PPC get the credit for the sale.
So social media is undervalued in your conversion data.

Worry
no more! Because we now have data that tells us if a traffic source
assisted with a conversion. That’s right, social media will now get
credit even if it only helps with a conversion and isn’t the most recent
traffic source.

Here’s where to find it in your Social Conversion Report:

Feast your eyes on the tasty insights!
There’s a bunch of new metrics on this page so let’s roll through some definitions.Assisted Conversions:
when a traffic source brings you a visitor but that visitor converts
during a different visit, an assisted conversion is recorded.Assisted Conversion Value: The total revenue received from all assisted conversions (includes goal values and ecommerce revenue).Last Interaction Conversions: The total number of conversions that were completed before visitors left your site.Last Interaction Conversion Value: The total amount of revenue that traffic immediately contributed before leaving.Assisted/Last Interaction Conversions:
It looks complicated but it’s just a ratio. If the number is close to
0, this traffic source closes deals and doesn’t assist. If it’s close to
1, there’s a nice balance between assists and deal-closing. The further
above 1 it gets, the bigger the role it plays with assists.
Out of all the new social reports, this is by far the most valuable. Learn to love this report.

Action Tip of Awesome

By
default, this conversion data combines your conversion from EVERY goal
on your site. I’m sure some of your goals are more important than
others. So try this button on for size:

By
clicking on the “Conversion” towards the top of your report, you can
pick and choose which goals should be displayed. Select your most
important goals or just pick one to get really detailed. With a few
clicks, you’ll see which social media sites are bringing you the most
valuable traffic.

Go ahead and get friendly with that button, you won’t regret it.

What about assisted conversions for non-social traffic?

If you’d like to see assisted conversion for all your traffic instead of just social media, follow these steps:

In your Google Analytics standard reports, click on Conversion in the left sidebar.

The pick Multi-Channel Funnels

Select Assisted Conversions

Party like it’s 1899 (so grab a top hat)

Social Plugins

Tired
of loading post after post on your blog to see what your recent tweet
counts are? We used to have to set up events on our social media buttons
in order to track them over time in Google Analytics. Well, Google
Analytics now has a new report that makes tracking your social media
buttons easier (kind of).

It’s called the Social Plugin report and it tracks every social button on your site. Go ahead and take a look:

Something seems to be missing… what could it be? Give me just one second, I’ve got this.
Oh
yes, it’s missing DATA. Where’d it go? So I forgot to mention one
little thing. The social plugin only tracks Google + buttons
automatically. For everything else, you’ll need to do some additional
setup. If you go straight to your social plugin report, you’ll get data
that’s just as blank as the report above.

The setup is very
similar to events. So instead of adding a little JavaScript to your site
to track social media buttons on your site as events, you now need to
add very similar JavaScript to your site to track social media buttons
as… social media buttons. Basically, it’s the same process as setting up
events but this data gets its own report.

Social Visitors Flow

The
Social Visitors Flow is the exact same report as the Visitor Flow
report. The only difference is that this flow report only shows traffic
from social media.

For each social network that drives a decent volume of traffic your way, follow these steps to isolate it:

Click on the social network

Select “View only this segment”

Now,
you’ll have a visitor flow for traffic from only that site. This is a
great way to see what content people tend to navigate to from each
social network. And by comparing different social sites to each other,
you can start to get a better sense for visitor behavior.

I’ll be
honest – I’m not a huge fan of the Visitor Flow reports. Why? Well,
there’s no way to include conversion data in these visitor flows. So
instead of getting insights on how your customers behave (which will
help you improve your business), the data includes all of your traffic.
This is very difficult to take action on since there’s no way to tell
what the valuable traffic (that part that includes your customers) is
doing. Optimizing for traffic is not the same thing as optimizing your
business.

Basically, the Visitor Flow reports are just a giant pile of vanity.
I’m
open to being persuaded otherwise. If you’ve found the Visitor Flow
reports to be super useful and they’ve helped you take action, get in
touch with me.

Bottom Line

The new Google Analytics
reports offer all sort of little goodies for social media buffs. But for
the rest of us, focus on the Conversions report. Now that Google is
including assisted conversions, you can get a much clearer picture on
how your social media campaign impacts revenue.
But be careful.
These reports only use the referring URL when assigning traffic to a
social media site. So if the referrer gets corrupted in any way, your
traffic won’t get assigned to the right network and all your data will
be skewed. If you commonly use URL shorteners, it’s very easy for the
data in your social reports to be incomplete.
What did I miss? Let
me know how you’re using the new Social Reports in the comments. If
your tactic is good enough, I just might feature you in this post ;)

About the Author: Lars Lofgren is the KISSmetrics
Marketing Analyst and has his Google Analytics Individual Qualification
(he’s certified). Learn how to grow your business at his marketing blog or follow him on Twitter @larslofgren.